LoRa looks like a really cool technology, but I'm always a little bit hesitant about advocating adopting a proprietary protocol, and LoRaWAN is very much proprietary.
I tried to make an open source radio system like LoRa before LoRa existed, but I mostly failed to deliver on my kickstarter. :-/
I did make a 915/868 MHz frequency hopping radio protocol that is open source, as well as ARM powered hardware to drive it, but it turns out everything I wanted to do was way more work than I realized.
Bummer that LoRa hardware is proprietary, but I suppose so was the cpu and radio chip I used. Would be nice to get some open source digital radio chips!
https://github.com/flutterwireless/FlutterWirelessLibrary
https://github.com/flutterwireless/FlutterHardware
I have lots of hardware I could share if anyone would pick it up in the Bay Area, and I can make all the IP CC0 or MIT licensed instead of copyleft it desired.
Does a single company own/control all the towers?
There are currently over 8000 of these gateways worldwide (see also the map on https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/map).